


consignment

by whenthesummertime



Category: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Ansem the Wise | DiZ Being An Asshole, Badass Naminé (Kingdom Hearts), Game: Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt Riku (Kingdom Hearts), Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Memory Loss, Pining Riku (Kingdom Hearts), Post-Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories, Pre-Kingdom Hearts II, Soriku - Freeform, it's not super explicit but it is the whole plot, it's there I just don't know how to write it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:00:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28422093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whenthesummertime/pseuds/whenthesummertime
Summary: "I can fix this, okay?"While they work to put Sora back together, Riku starts getting torn apart.
Relationships: Ansem the Wise | DiZ & Riku, Ansem the Wise | DiZ/Riku, Naminé & Riku (Kingdom Hearts), Riku & Sora (Kingdom Hearts)
Kudos: 19





	consignment

**Author's Note:**

> do you need some bitter coffee to balance out all that tooth-rotting fluff you've been reading? here you go

Naminé is there to grab him as the door opens and he falls through the threshold. ( _Is pushed through._ ) He falls to the ground, but is conscious, erratic. A flurry of black, silver, and flicks of red. She sees his brow, furrowed with pain and confusion and the beginnings of the emotion he had tasked her to prevent, to erase. 

He is quietly on the verge of hyperventilating, this time. 

“Hey,” she says too rushed to be calm, because it’s always too much to let him talk, “it’s over, I know, but it’s over, let’s fix this—I can fix this, okay?” 

She hoists him half-up onto her right shoulder, the ease of which betrays the (weak) demeanor she tries to present to others, and all but drags him through the mansion and back to her room. 

This is not the first time, it doesn’t feel like the first time for her, but it does for Riku. Almost. He remembers just enough to know he had asked her to do this, and Naminé only hopes she can work fast enough before he connects the _why_ with her practiced maneuvers, lacking any hesitation, clear signs of a routine. 

His blindfold is tight, almost bruising, his skin feverish. His hair is plastered against his skin with sweat, a few silver strands caught in the corner of his lips as he whispers out a mantra of denial. ( _They look swollen._ ) 

She gets to work.

—

Riku doesn’t sleep with his blindfold on, but he’s grateful to have it in the morning. He hesitates some mornings, usually the ones where he jerks awake after a particularly lucid nightmare, when his mind briefly rebels, _please don’t make me go back to the darkness so soon._

Most mornings, however, he is quick to tie the knot firmly behind his head. Those mornings, he begins bowed over, making his silvery hair fall forward toward his face so it doesn’t get caught in the knot he’s tying, hoping the opaque fabric will ease the pounding in his head. Those mornings, he covers his eyes just before the sun rises, but he can never get rid of his headache. 

All mornings, he covers his eyes before he can look at himself.

He knows some things about himself have changed, though. He knows he’s lost weight—he can feel it as he places his hand on his ribcage, gets dressed and notices his clothes hang loosely. He can feel the consequences of his carelessness during missions: bruises he doesn’t remember getting, dehydration cracking his lips and drying out his hair, lowered immune system giving him sore throats and minor fevers. 

He also notices his changes through the sound of Naminé’s voice, and how she moves around him. He can hear the concern hiding behind her questions and comments. She tiptoes with her words, but her actions are anything but cautious toward him. She is more often goading, cajoling, always more handsy than he remembered from the previous day. Herding him out the door when he has a new assignment, or trying to keep him from leaving his room when he shows signs of fever. Pushing against him with familiarity.

He isn’t sure what to think of it, and wouldn’t give it much extra thought if not for a hint of something else under her voice. Something she’s hiding. 

Sometimes he thinks about taking his blindfold off during the day, to see what about him is causing her to act like this. But when it comes time to undress and shower, he finds himself turning the lights off before untying the knot.

—

It’s not like it’s uncommon for all of them to be in the same room. 

Naminé thinks about this as she stands quietly next to the door leading to the basement hall. DiZ is by the computer, reading stats and figures off the screen. His weekly meetings give an update on Sora’s progress in recovering his memories which serve as a reflection of Riku’s and Naminé’s progress in completing their individual assignments. Mickey is looking up at the screen, standing next to DiZ. It is less common for him to make these meetings, but it puts Naminé at ease.

Riku is by the door to the library, listening to DiZ with an unreadable expression on his face. Naminé probably knows better than Riku about what he’s struggling with internally. She doesn’t need to see his eyes to know he has as much of an urge to walk over to Sora’s pod and remain there as he does to bolt out the door and run away from the mansion. The former urge he is in denial of, and the second he doesn’t understand, so he stays close to the exit, listening intently to DiZ’s update and Mickey’s occasional questions and affirmations. 

It is better, and usually easier, when they are all together. Especially with Mickey here. Naminé knows Riku always feels more relaxed when Mickey can visit them at the mansion. It is only _not_ easy for Naminé the day after _it_ happens, when she doesn’t want to keep up the facade. Sometimes it’s easier when it’s just her and DiZ, and she doesn’t have to pretend, doesn’t have to hide her emotions, even if all she gets from DiZ is cold denial. Riku, however, is not okay when she’s alone with DiZ. If he isn’t out doing reconnaissance on the Organization, he’ll pace the halls with misplaced paranoia until she emerges from her meeting with the man. Her presence alone reminds him he’s acting a little too feral, and he’ll snap out of it and ask for an update. When Riku is with both Naminé and DiZ, she’ll see him mulling over his anxiety before ultimately casting it aside and portraying a ( _forced_ ) passive demeanor.

As DiZ launches into the tasks for the upcoming week, and she sees the percentages on the screen a few points closer to 100 than last week, she thinks, _this is why I’m doing this. This is why I can’t let the other shoe drop._

She looks over at Riku, unsure if he can sense her gaze on him. 

—

“Do you want to go see Sora?”

That’s how Naminé chooses to say good morning to Riku some days later, poking her head through the threshold just as he’s tying his blindfold on. He then learns from her, through his piercing headache, that today is one of those rare days DiZ is out on his own errands. He tries to remember DiZ bringing it up yesterday, but his mind is drawing an incredibly large blank.

He nods and swings his feet over to the floor, and is rising from the bed when his heartbeat jumps into his skull and suddenly he’s back to a sitting position and Naminé is right there, holding him steady with small but strong hands. _Huh._

“Are you okay?” Naminé asks, concern poking out from its hiding place for a brief moment. 

Riku pauses, hesitating from his typical response. “I don’t know,” he decides to say instead. He does a body scan, mentally appraising his health. Notices how sore he is, the tenderness on his back, the difficulty in swallowing, dizziness that won’t go away, the budding signs of illness. He curses himself for not catching his descent sooner—he can usually recover his health if he notices the decline early enough. 

“You’re a little banged up,” Naminé murmurs, voice flat, “must’ve been a rough mission.” She doesn’t elaborate, but why would she? Riku is the one who went. He fought… something, that must’ve given him a concussion, perhaps. He knows there’s no point to casting _Cure_ magic, because he knows Naminé does it when he’s asleep and if it worked he wouldn’t be feeling like this right now.

“Mn,” Riku hums it off. “We can go see Sora now.” It softly, barely has the hinting lilt of a question at the end. He acknowledges the struggle it may take him to get there on his own. 

Naminé nods, then loops her arm around his and hefts him into a standing position, waiting for his vertigo to subside before moving them to the door. From an outsider’s view, it easily looks as though she has her arm linked with his in a ladylike fashion, and the two are merely going for a stroll. But Riku knows Naminé’s strength as she supports a good portion of his weight, still feeling the guilt of burdening her in this way. She feels so cold, yet he’s the one shivering.

She walks him down halls and up and down flights of stairs, and by the time they are walking past Donald’s and Goofy’s pods and reaching Sora’s room, Riku almost looks like he is ready to pass out. 

As soon as the door opens, and he senses Sora, his fatigue and dizziness fade to the back of his mind. 

He stumbles out of Naminé’s hold and almost falls toward Sora’s pod, his body lagging a few steps behind from where his mind is. _Sora._ He passes a kettle and pile of objects that he doesn’t see and almost collapses against the glass, wishing it wasn’t so cold, then quietly apologizing for wishing it wasn’t so cold. Only in these moments, when he is inches away from the sleeping boy, does Riku try to fight the feeling of being miles away from Sora. He still doesn’t quite succeed, but he’ll keep fighting as long as he’s in the room. _Why is it so cold?_

“S-Sora,” Riku rasps out, licking his chapped lips. He wants to stand there to stay eye level with his friend, but the vertigo is rushing back to him and his legs tremble. Slowly, he sinks down to the base of the pod, not needing to see that his head is closer to Sora’s shoes. His cheeks burn from ( _fever_ ) the shame of showing Sora just how weak he is right now. “I’m sorry, I can’t… I have to stay down here for now.” He usually talks to his friend with honesty, so why is he struggling?

He almost forgets Naminé’s presence until a heavy weight is placed over his shoulders ( _blanket_ ) and a warm ceramic cup is nudged into his hands ( _tea_ ). The dense clink of the kettle set down near him softly tells Riku that Naminé had been here earlier in the morning to prepare for his visit. She sits nearby and slightly behind him in her usual chair, quiet as he coughs from the spiciness of the tea’s fresh ginger warming his throat.

He finishes what’s in the cup, then tilts his head up and rests it against the base of the memory pod, ignoring the itchy ache in his throat as he stretches it upwards, covered eyes directed at what he knows is Sora’s lowered face. It’s a hard position to keep, and it makes it harder for him to talk, but he doesn’t move. 

“How are you?” He asks, leaving a pause to contemplate how Sora would answer the question, making space for the conversation in his head. _Did he ever used to ask Sora how he was when he was awake?_

“You would probably say something sappy, like, _I’m glad you’re here,_ ” he muses. Naminé gives a small hum of agreement. She is as much a participant of these conversations as Riku is, and he appreciates her steady presence. 

“I wonder where you are now,” he says, taking a couple seconds to draw in a few breaths before continuing, “do you dream of this room, the mansion? Or are you off in another world?” 

Flashes of Neverland, Hollow Bastion, and Castle Oblivion flick through his head. “Or maybe you’re on the beach, being a lazy bum with Kairi,” he huffs out a breathy laugh. 

“I think I’ve finally been to worlds you haven’t visited yet,” he continues after a pause, saying to both Sora and Naminé. “Although I guess technically you’ve never seen Twilight Town either. Turns out Organization XIII has a pretty big range. And now with…” The names get caught in his throat. Even with Sora asleep, Riku can’t bring himself to mention the names of the Organization’s keyblade wielders around him very often. 

He clears his throat, and waits for a wave of dizziness to pass. “The monsters can be pretty tough, sometimes. Nothing you can’t handle, but I don’t have two sidekicks helping me out.” Swerving to humor and teasing, always, even now as he lies on the ground sweating and shivering. He tries again. “Sometimes… I don’t know if I can do it on my own.” 

Another pause, then, “You’re not alone,” Naminé affirms softly. She leans over to pour more tea into his cup. 

He lowers his head and takes a sip, clamping his mouth shut for a moment to stop his teeth from chattering, and keeps his head lowered instead of lifting it back up to Sora. Ponders it for a bit. “That’s true,” he weighs out carefully, “it’s just…” 

Shifting a little to try and relieve the pains in his lower back, he positions his obscured gaze not-quite at Naminé’s ankles. There’s something he’s trying to work out in his head, but it’s pounding and he can’t focus. Naminé remains patient.

“...It feels,” he finally gets out, “like it’s getting harder. Or I’m getting weaker. I keep losing, and… this…” he motions to himself, his current state, “is making us lose progress. I’m slowing us down. Our _Curas_ barely work, and my head… whatever I faced off against, I don’t - I don’t remember.” 

By the end, he is directing his words mostly to Naminé, and he pants from the exertion of saying so much. 

“You need more rest,” she quips back to him. “You don’t usually give your body enough time to recover.” 

“I hardly exert myself on any of my missions,” he retorts. The usual bite of stubbornness is dulled by body shakes and uneven breaths. “You wouldn’t get like this,” he sends up to Sora, adding him back into the conversation. “You never get sick, too strong to get hurt.” 

He can almost hear Naminé open her mouth to shoot back a wise reply, then shut it. _You’re being a brat,_ he can imagine her saying. She takes the high road. “More rest wouldn’t hurt.” 

But Riku feels like something is missing, and he tilts his chin back up to face the boy with peaceful features gracing his soft face. His mind is jumbled, maybe because of the fever, maybe from whatever he had fought yesterday. “I won’t be able to get back out there as soon as I’d like. I’m sorry. Just a little longer, Sora.” 

They drift to chatting about going through the kitchen while DiZ is out and cataloguing what he needs to pick up in town so they’re stocked up for a few more weeks. Naminé contributes bits and pieces, supplying information on food they’ve run out of and how much munny they’ve got, patient when Riku’s mind grays out or he loses his place in a sentence. Sounds of a pencil scratching against dry but soft paper fills in the gaps of silence. _She must be working on Sora._

“Do you know when he’s coming back?” 

The pencil scratching pauses, just long enough to be noticed. “Hmm, I think maybe three days from now,” Naminé answers, knowing he’s not talking about Sora. “He is off-world.”

Riku gives a soft _mnn_ in acknowledgement. Head nodding slightly, he shrugs the blanket up his shoulders. 

He isn’t sure exactly when he falls asleep. Suddenly he blinks, his blindfold is missing, Sora is there next to him, and Sora is still in the pod. Riku doesn’t start when he sees two Soras because he knows he’s dreaming. He’s dreamt of Sora countless times. Naminé isn’t there but he can still _feel_ her there behind him just as he’s still aware of his place on the ground in Sora’s pod room. After he finishes with this thought, he turns back to Sora and finds overwhelmingly concerned blue eyes and furrowed brows directed at him. 

“Riku,” Sora’s voice is part chastising, part worry, “what’s going on? Who did this to you?”

Confusion passes over Riku’s features, his bright teal eyes shifting slightly to the side. “Who? It’s not a big deal. Probably just some high-level Nobody that I let get the better of me.” 

“You’re sick,” Sora pouts. “You’re not taking care of yourself.” 

Riku wants to wipe the worry and sadness off the other boy’s face, even though it’s not really Sora. _How does he do that?_ “I’m fine, Sora. We’re trying our best to get you ready to wake up. I can’t waste time.” 

A hand reaches for his face, and he starts, unaccustomed to seeing without his blindfold. Sora’s fingers ghost his temple, then his palm rests against Riku’s cheek. He leans into the warm touch, allowing himself this once to let his vulnerability take charge, surprised by how real a touch can feel within a dream. 

For a moment, they sit like that silently, Riku letting himself exist like this with his dream, then he lets something slip– _a thought, a memory?_ He feels like he dropped something he didn’t realize he was carrying until it fell out of his hand. Something in his mind shifts. Then he remembers another hand on his face that—

Sora’s eyes widen. The hand drops. They stare at each other, close, breaths cold and hot against smooth, dry and clammy, moist skin. 

Riku struggles to recall the memory that dropped halfway with his friend’s warm palm. Meanwhile, Sora has a growing look of horror on his face, and when he talks it causes a ringing in Riku’s ears ( _does it?_ ). 

“You need to get out. _You can’t do this!_ ” 

“Wha—” Riku starts, trying to make out Sora’s words over the ear-piercing ringing, then the world blurs and suddenly comes back into focus as hands are on him _—no no no, not that, not here—_ Sora’s shaking his shoulders, then jabs his hands under Riku’s armpits to try and pull him up. But he can’t get up, because he’s still asleep, his fevered mind flashing between his position on the floor and being tugged up by Sora like a sand-filled doll. _Is this sleep paralysis?_

“Why are you letting this happen?!” Oh, he had blinked and now Sora is standing over him, talking to the air behind him. 

_What are you doing? Stop!_ That was Naminé, but Naminé isn’t here, she sounds like she’s yelling from behind a wall in another room. Then there’s more yelling, a different yelling, and it’s also coming from outside the room, just beyond the door. 

A flurry of two or zero bodies rush around him, and he still can’t move, still can’t wake up. His mind tries to move his arm to find that it’s no longer connected to his mind at all, and someone is just beyond the door. _Who is that? Whose hand–_

His breathing picks up, and he realizes that’s not connected to his mind either, because he can’t slow it down. Riku wants to say something, wants to yell out, but his throat is disconnected too, and it’s so sore, he tries to swallow and can’t. Begins to panic. 

Sora’s shaking him, but maybe it’s not Sora, the hands are bigger than Sora’s—or maybe smaller—and for just an instant—

_it’s dark, and Riku just started breathing again, right after his head cracked against the wall. Gasping, really, after the hands holding his throat threw him back. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, channeling the adrenaline to fight or flee into disassociating as much as he possibly could. He believed it when he was told he couldn’t stop this, not until Sora woke up, and after an hour or so (days? weeks?) he learned that fighting back made things worse, so if he could just get through it he would be fine, he had to be fine. It was just when he ripped Riku’s blindfold off, and Riku saw his golden eyes, that he forgot who—_

—the tip of a pencil presses down too hard on paper and snaps—and he forgets.

He forgets. 

Riku shoots upright, sweat soaking his blindfold and causing his eyes to burn from the salt. Heart pounding, he reaches up to pull it off, but freezes mid-way—he’s not in his bedroom. He’s on the floor. Holding his breath, he listens, determining he is in Sora’s pod room and Naminé is seated slightly behind him in her usual seat. 

DiZ is gone for a few days, they had gone downstairs to see Sora, and Riku must’ve fallen asleep and had a nightmare. His head is pounding. 

“Riku?” Naminé asks hesitantly, shifting in her chair. He must have scared her. His muscles and joints ache from where he must’ve been thrashing on the floor–or no, he had been sore before he fell asleep. 

“...I’m sorry.” That’s all he can think to say. 

“For what, silly?” He hears her fold her sketchbook closed and stand up. “You just dozed off. It’s not a big deal.” After brushing off her dress, she walks a few steps to him and he can sense her just next to Sora. 

“We were talking about restocking the kitchen,” she continues, thumping her sketchbook with her pencil, “I started a list. You wanna go upstairs and finish it?”

It doesn’t need to be vocalized for Riku to hear it. _Are you ready?_ He knows her hand is outstretched, ready to help him up. He takes it. 

When DiZ returns three days later, Riku is already out on his mission to locate Xion, and he doesn’t know why that makes him feel both dread and relief.

—

The first time it happened, Naminé witnessed part of it. 

There’s no covert reason for why she happened to be there. It’s because Riku’s yells ( _screams_ ) were so loud that she could hear them from outside the mansion, and with them were some accompanying thuds and crashes. 

She had been taking a walk around the grounds in the forest—a routine she had taken to after some not-quite arguments with DiZ—and was just walking back through the gate, orange sunlight hitting the white curtains of her bedroom window, when she heard Riku and started trotting toward the doors. 

Grabbing the handles, she slipped through the doors and didn’t waste a second jogging into the foyer, her head whipping back and forth to both triangulate the source of her friend’s shouts and assess the threat. _Had Nobodies broken into the mansion? Was it the Organization?_ She wouldn’t pause for these thoughts, but instead entertain them for a millisecond amidst the hundreds of other questions and calculations swarming through her head as she quickened her gait up the stairs and into the library. 

Naminé was used to being a quiet person, all her movements discreet from unconscious practice and habit. This is what allowed her to catch a too-long glimpse into what was happening.

Her first impression of the scene was that DiZ had blood on his hands, and Riku was about to give up.

He was struggling against strong magic, _Stopga_ from what Naminé could deduce. Cast recently, from what she could tell. The silver-haired boy was pinned against the wall of the depressed room underneath the library, his blindfold off but eyes scrunched shut. His arms were splayed out and stiff against the wall from the spell, hand still clutching the air as if his keyblade had been materialized only a moment ago. That was all Naminé could see of her friend–the rest of him was obscured by DiZ, who was looming over him, his mouth next to Riku’s ear. Through all the chaos, she could see his lips moving.

There was sickening movement between them—Riku’s head hitting against the wall with a steady rhythm—a tear fell down a pale cheek and mixed with blood, and a flash of sea-green, first mixed with shock and anger, then anguish, then most startlingly, emptiness. 

She only hesitated for a moment.

“ ** _Stopra_** ** _!_** ” 

She screamed, her voice breaking with the high pitch, but poured all her energy into a spell she had rarely ever casted, directed at a man she had never before attacked. Didn’t spend too much time thinking about how useful the spell was for any intention. 

It worked, DiZ frozen in place just as he was beginning to whip around and face Naminé. Not knowing how much time she had or the strength of her spell, she bolted down the stairs and tore Riku away from the man. It wasn’t easy—her friend was still mostly stiff from the effects of DiZ’s spell, eyes glazed from shock—but she was strong enough, almost surprised by how light the boy felt as she twisted her hands in his black robe. She didn’t look down, didn’t look at the details, didn’t spare DiZ a glance—but her ears caught his growl.

“You can’t… stop me,” he wrestled out from deep in his throat, “and you can’t—change me, witch… You need me, all of me—” he stopped sharply to suck in a gasp of air through his teeth, chest locked, fighting the magic— “if you ever– want Sora… to wake up.” 

She didn’t freeze at that, not even for a split second, just focused on dragging Riku up the steps, and didn’t even pause when she heard DiZ hiss up at her—

“I know who he is…! He’s m—”

Naminé slammed the door shut after clearing Riku’s legs from the threshold. Only then did she notice a dark heaviness between the man and the boy—it lifted, like chains wrapping them both together were unceremoniously picked up, and then dropped, to pool at Riku’s feet.

She dragged him up another flight and into her room, her eyes darting back and forth across the sterile white expanse. _What could she do? If she went after DiZ’s memories—would she take too much, disrupt his connection to Sora, or was he bluffing? Or what if he meant something different? What was that weight between them? What did he mean when he said he knew—_

“Naminé,” a small, soft voice called her name, and she whipped around to actually look at Riku for the first time. All the breath left her lungs and out her mouth, lips parted in an ‘oh.’ 

_Stopga_ had worn off, but Riku was still lying on his stomach, one leg bent and his elbows beneath him as he kept his head off the ground by a few inches. Silver locks fell forward over his face and dragged on the floor, matted with blood. As he shifted to move off his chest and onto his side, she finally allowed herself to process that his clothes under his cloak were almost completely ripped off, skin torn in the wake of whatever DiZ had used to slash at them. 

Blood caked on his thighs, drippings of it down his calves already dried. One of his feet was bent unnaturally at the ankle. Angry and dark bruises littered his pale skin all the way up to his throat, which was working hard to swallow and keep down bile. 

He was trying to look up at her, blood and hair getting in the way and causing him to wince. She knelt down next to him, starting to reach her hand out to cup his cheek and then stopping when he flinched back. 

“Please,” he pleaded, slowly opening his eyes again and looking up at her as if she was too bright a light, and then she saw it–teal to gold, gold to teal. “Naminé, help.”

She heard a thud downstairs, and put herself into motion. Quickly grabbing her notebook and pencils with one hand, she threw her other hand forward, and a dark corridor burst into being. She did not wait for Riku to react, just took his hood between her fingers and hauled him through. 

She had not put much thought into where they could go. She had only ever been to two places. So there they were, in one of the hundreds of blank rooms within Castle Oblivion. Not as big of a risk, she surmised, as staying in the mansion. 

She sat down next to the boy’s writhing form, beginning to work a _Cura_. Between her quick movements and the dark corridor, she could tell he was fighting off a full blown panic attack. Involuntary coughs and pink saliva seeped from the corners of his mouth, a sign that nausea would soon take over.

“Naminé, Naminé,” he kept chanting, grasping for her hands that were working the spell, “Naminé, he… I _can’t,_ ” his voice broke, and he twisted over, back convulsing with a mix of dry heaves and sobs. She pulled his hair back and out of his face, not ceasing her murmurs of _Cure_ magic. Blood mixed with bile splattered onto the ground, then Riku sucked in a shaky breath between sobs.

“Naminé,” he tried to twist his face up to hers again, the bruises slowly fading but the blood still flecked across his features, “Naminé, c-can’t– can’t hold him off, p-please. Naminé, please. I… I–I, I, I…” he got stuck in a stutter, and she saw his eyes trapped on something she couldn’t see. They were flickering between teal and gold erratically, staying gold for longer and longer even as she moved the pain further out of his body. The bones in his ankle made a sickening crunching sound as they reformed to become whole. 

He was looking up at her, begging for something even as a war was being waged inside his head. A war he was losing. 

_It was too much. He’s shutting down, surrendering to darkness._

His eyes flickered back to a murky sea-green, and held. “Naminé,” he sobbed, “t-take it away. P-please.”

Her eyebrows furrowed in confusion, then it dawned on her what he was begging for. “...Riku, it’ll...” 

“I can’t… c-can’t lose Sora,” he pleaded, and her nonexistent heart broke. He blinked tears out of his eyes, and they were golden once he opened them again. His breathing was starting to quicken, fingers curling and releasing the hem of her dress repeatedly. She could begin to feel the darkness in him swelling, taking over. The invisible chains pooled at his feet started creeping up to crush him with their weight.

“Okay… okay,” she conceded. “I can fix this.” She leaned slightly to grab her notebook and pencils, hesitated a moment longer, then bent down slightly and put her lips to his bloodied hair. “ _Sleepra,_ ” she murmured softly against his scalp, and his head slowly fell to the floor.

She got to work.

—

Xion doesn’t know much about Riku, but she sees enough to know something is wrong. 

At first she doesn’t think much of it—he’s a fighter, and he’s not going to look good if he’s fighting all the time (especially if he loses)—and later on she just doesn’t have the space in her head to think about it. It’s not like the wellbeing of strangers is high on her priority list when she has her friends and her memories and her existence to worry about. So it’s only really an observation that flits in and out of her mind during her fights, arguments, and conversations with the tall blindfolded boy. 

But he feels familiar to her… and his voice is always so soft. And despite words that make her bristle, he is always kind. And honest.

With blades, they dance around each other like two people who have met before but forgot each other’s names. The next time they meet, Riku has remembered first, but only because he had help. 

So while her mind is mostly on herself— _and Sora, and Kairi—_ and her friends, she spares a few thoughts for Riku. 

Namely, something is wrong with him. 

He is so strong. She isn’t over-confident knowing that to be able to beat her takes considerable strength… and after overhearing Axel mention his name to a higher-up after his return from Castle Oblivion, she learns he’s not a threat to be taken lightly. He fights and moves with the grace of someone unaware of his injuries, which makes them stand out even more. Because despite his strength, his body looks as if it’s falling apart, and he just hasn’t noticed yet. 

He never mentions it. She’s never seen him use any potions, never seen him cast _Cure,_ and yet each time they meet, he looks progressively worse. 

She can’t think of a force more powerful than the Organization, and it makes her wonder who or what he’s _losing_ to. Something deep, deep inside her aches when she looks at the bruises on his collarbone, the dried blood barely visible against the black of his coat… so much so that she chases her memories of Sora and Kairi even more fervently, just to try and get rid of that dull pain. 

When he helps her piece together her fragments of memory on Destiny Islands, Xion wrestles with her conflicted emotions and onslaught of questions she can’t bring herself to ask. She thrashes between confusion ( _what are you to Sora? Why am I a product of Sora and Kairi, and not Sora and you?_ ) to anger, when the pain starts to sharpen just behind her skull ( _why does the burden fall on me? Do you hate me for taking your friend away from you?_ ). 

She doesn’t realize she snarled her last thought out loud until she hears Riku’s soft voice reply, “Nah. I guess... I’m just sad.” 

Startled, she looks up at him and sees it, sees his sadness. Not remorse over his actions, not shame for looking so beaten, not self-pity over his loss. An overwhelming, all-encompassing sadness, that immerses the boy and leaves little room for anything else. It’s a wonder he can spare enough to think of Xion and offer her this resolute kindness. 

It makes her think of Axel and Roxas, and then makes her wonder if she can ever _feel_ as much as Riku does in this moment. 

( _Does she want to?_ ) 

She never asks Riku who he’s losing to, and never finds out. There’s just a moment, before she heads out to confront the Organization at the mansion’s gates, and she is in Naminé’s room with her and a strange deep-voiced man for only a few false heartbeats, when Xion wonders. Just a moment, when this stranger arrives in a shroud of darkness, with an accusatory and spiteful tone and showing only one eye ( _a half-shade off from Xemnas’s_ ), and Naminé is staring at him with an expression that only someone without a heart can recognize, that Xion wonders. 

Just a moment, and then it’s gone, and Xion is bolting away from Naminé’s warning shouts and toward the outside gates to go protect Sora.

—

It isn’t until Riku lets the darkness take over, that his headaches fade. 

He never lets it take over completely. He’s not sure what that would take, but he can feel it there, in the back of his mind, a dull and patient tap. Changing into Ansem to capture Roxas is not letting the darkness be all-encompassing and consuming, but it’s just enough to make his throat tighten with shame. But... the piercing pain in his head is fading. 

All his aches and pains gradually begin to fade, in fact—except for a new throbbing in his left wrist. Everything seems like such a small price to pay, for Sora.

_Sora. Sora. Sora. Sora. Sora._

His friend’s name echoes in his head over and over, the slumbering boy taking up full residence in Riku’s thoughts. There’s not much else he thinks about. 

He keeps his hood pulled up, keeping himself in the darkness in more ways than one… but he’s seeing without a blindfold for the first time in months. 

He sees Roxas, sees DiZ, then sees Naminé. They all make him feel wildly different emotions. Some of them, he would spend more time on. But then he sees Sora.

_Sora. Sora. Sora._

After depositing Roxas in the Data Twilight Town, he goes to check on his friend. A whirlwind of feelings overwhelms him as he stands, frozen, inches away from the glass of the pod. 

He can’t put his hand on the glass. He can’t take his hood down. He isn’t sure if he’s never felt closer to the blue-eyed boy, or the farthest he’s been since opening the door on Destiny Islands. 

“How are y—”

The words stick in his throat, stopping him like brakes slamming accidentally. 

He had almost forgotten. That’s not his voice. He doesn’t want Sora to hear this voice. 

For barely less than a moment, Riku allows his chest to tighten ever so slightly as the urge to cry begins to manifest. Then he swallows thickly and sweeps it away. Not again in front of Sora will he let his shame ruin his happiness of successfully completing his mission. _It’s such a small price to pay._

He looks back up from where he had averted his gaze, and settles again on the boy’s sleeping face. When he thinks about all the things he misses about Sora—his sky-blue eyes, his eclipsing grin, the unending energy and enthusiasm, the glint of determination that Riku always caught glimpses of and secretly used to save himself—his heart swells. Unintentionally, a surge of longing rushes into his chest and settles heavy into the pit of his stomach, and he lets his desperation slip into his consciousness. _Will Sora and I ever see each other again? Will we ever know each other again?_

He freezes on the thought for too long before minutely shaking his head and forcing himself to dull his mind. Taking one last glance at the child hero he feels too much for, he turns around and strides out of the room, resolving to only dream of the future up to the point of Sora waking up, and no further. 

—

Naminé notices the shift in DiZ within hours of Riku bringing Roxas into the mansion. 

She doesn’t catch it right away, mainly because DiZ doesn’t act much differently from how he did in between his bouts of violence. She is not good at reading DiZ, but there’s something off about him, an emptiness in a spot where it hadn’t been. Once Roxas is deposited into Data Twilight Town, she runs the softest of probes over DiZ, then between him and Riku, and finds the heaviness connecting them that she had felt since the first attack is gone. 

When DiZ enters her room later, she braces herself and tries a different probe. After talking on the edge of an argument over Roxas for a while, she laces the question in. 

“What you did to Riku…” she hints with a glare. He returns it with that same emptiness she saw earlier, where an overwhelmingly sharp coldness had once been. 

“Riku brought this upon himself,” DiZ states matter-of-factly, “succumbing to… _Ansem’s_ form was the choice he made for Sora. I played no part in that.” 

Naminé’s glare almost slips into furrowed confusion as he says this, and as she feels for any darkness behind his words or heaviness from his mind, she comes up short. This isn’t the taunting, barely-masked denial that had come from the man any previous time she had dared to challenge him. This isn’t him pretending not to know what she’s referring to, but a smooth and whole not-knowing. 

But there—like a lump deep under the skin, she feels the memories like a doctor finding a cancer unknown to the patient. Sinking deeper still, she feels them receding further from her and his grasp, and she frowns. 

DiZ misreads her expression and chides, “It seems that, unlike Riku, you are having second thoughts on the importance of this mission. Or have you forgotten your own role in Sora’s fate?” 

With that, he leaves, and Naminé remains staring at the space where DiZ had stood as the door clicks shut. _He doesn’t remember. The memories are fading away... or being hidden. What does this mean?_

She wants to piece things together, to figure this out before it comes back ( _to keep it from coming back_ ), but when the situation with Roxas begins to get out of hand, she has to reprioritize. She takes her stack of drawings, and her apprehensive dread, and hides them away. 

—

When Riku lets her and Axel go, Naminé takes back out her feelings of what she had subconsciously decided months ago to do as soon as it was safe… as soon as it was over. 

Sora is awake, Roxas is gone, she is free—and she doesn’t have any time to waste. 

Leveraging Axel’s apathy of her in the face of his grief, she takes her own dark corridor to Castle Oblivion, where she had stashed all her drawings of Riku and DiZ. It frankly had taken all her willpower not to burn them as soon as she had finished each one, but she somehow knew she would be using them later, now. 

Hoping that by now, after almost an entire year, DiZ’s connection to Sora is strong enough–she begins to work on mentally manifesting the chains connecting the erratic and abusive man to Sora’s ( _and her_ ) best friend. 

She lays all the drawings out on the floor chronologically, and tries not to feel sick. Reminds herself of her existence as a Nobody, in an attempt to suppress her own disputed emotions. 

When she breaks the chains of people’s memories, she is never as cautious or careful as she has been when linking them back together. Even when taking away Riku’s memories of trauma, she always operated with some level of carelessness, borne from command, ignorance, or panic. She could afford it with her friend, as the memories were always recent, lacked any pattern or prediction, and were never referenced to Riku later by her or DiZ. She could destroy them as the outliers she pretended for them to be. 

As for DiZ’s memories, however, she is not able to pretend. 

His abuse and torture of Riku lasted months, could have been premeditated, dwelled on, and linked to countless reasons or sentiments. She doesn’t know. Naminé wants fiercely to rip the entire last year from the man’s mind, but she knows she can’t. That would ultimately cause others to start digging into the anomaly, putting Riku again at risk by exposing his trauma to himself and everyone he knows. In addition, with Organization XIII still at large, she knows without a doubt that DiZ still has a crucial role to play. 

She also knows she can’t resort to revenge over a man who uses it all too much—and if anyone had the right to enact such a level of vengeful justice, it wouldn’t be her right to take. 

And to that end, she could not enact revenge over a man who truly doesn’t remember his actions against Riku for the better part of the year. She houses worry over what could happen if she meddles and snaps DiZ back to that state—but, knowing the memories are still within him and carry another risk, she forges on. 

If she can permanently remove as much of Riku’s abuse from DiZ’s own buried memory, without obstructing much else, that might suffice. But if she can find the root cause, and obliterate it… 

She remains in Castle Oblivion for the first half of the work, gathering the chains of events–the acts themselves–and forming their links as best she can from what she’s already collected by envisioning the memories from each drawing. She can’t begin to even describe to herself how that process feels. She had drawn these memories in a flurry, taking Riku’s experience from him as quickly as she could, leaving little time to absorb what she had sketched out on the paper. Now she must absorb. Some of the drawings are more abstract, capturing the representation of Riku’s emotions through scrawls and deep strokes of color. A few, when she was almost too late, are just clouds and smears of black. More than half, however, depict clearly the scenes that Naminé can never rescue Riku from. 

Starting from the beginning and moving through the months, she’s shocked at how much she was missing by only focusing on the aftermath of whatever the latest incursion had been. As time progresses, Riku’s memories show that he gradually spent less and less time struggling and fighting back before giving up, even though his memory of every previous assault had been erased and his initial reaction was always the same as the very first time. Almost as if his body remembered, even though his mind didn’t. 

His body, too, gradually became weaker and more resistant to _Cure_ magic. The last few times it happened, Riku had been so overcome with exhaustion that Naminé can hardly make it through the memory without her vision graying out. The differences between the beginning, the end, and after Riku took Ansem’s form is almost unbelievable. 

Through the blood and pain and _wrongness_ , she tries to focus on DiZ— his expressions, his words, his behaviors… and the heavy, suffocating chains between them that she still can’t understand.

When she’s gathered all that she can from Riku’s perspective, she sweeps her drawings together and takes a dark corridor into her room at the mansion. She can sense DiZ downstairs, knowing he can’t sense her. She has to move fast, though—the risk of being discovered and the risk of DiZ leaving before she finishes are both too high and unacceptable. 

Sparing a thought on Riku’s current form, she begins to quietly probe DiZ’s mind, picking away at that _smooth and whole not-knowing_ to dive deep, looking for any insidious thought of the silver-haired boy and leaving the rest alone. Softly, she takes the pieces she scoops out of DiZ’s memories and uses them to link together each separate attack into one long, twisted chain, laden with that incomprehensible weight. All her work with Sora ( _and Riku_ ) over the past year has honed her ability into a sharp scalpel, allowing her to move with speed and precision now that she knows where to look and how to isolate memories. 

What takes the most time, and causes her the most fear of failure, is locating the root. She isn’t sure how far back she needs to look, how far back she _can_ look, or if it even exists within DiZ. Trying to search DiZ’s erratic memories before he met Sora feels like trying to use a muscle that has never been used. At first she almost decides it isn’t worth the effort, but it gets a little easier each time she pushes, and soon she is scanning his older memories that had been linked to newer ones by the undercurrents of his motivations. 

It doesn’t take too long from there to find something. The feelings toward and memories DiZ—the real Ansem—has of his first apprentice are shrouded with conflict and a heavy dose of DiZ’s own suppression–but the feeling _between_ them knocks the breath out of her lungs. 

That weight… that heaviness… the same oppressive darkness that wrapped around Riku and DiZ is _here,_ wrapping around Ansem and his apprentice, twisting and constricting and dragging across the floor of the lab. Ansem—DiZ—seems unaware of it in these memories... while it pools at the younger man’s feet. Though she can only reach so far, she feels the chains extending out to the other apprentices too, pulling everyone’s hearts silently toward this young, sharp-eyed scientist. The darkness is so heavy around him that she can’t even sense a heart within him, can’t sense a person at all. Just a name, remembered by DiZ with malice and guilt… _Xehanort._

Xehanort. The root does not stem from DiZ, but from Xehanort.

This darkness-infested man, with white hair and golden eyes...

She pulls out momentarily, thinking back to all the times she probed or meddled with Riku’s memories. In Castle Oblivion, over the past year, even after his recent transformation. She had grown familiar with the form of _that_ man, the manifestation of darkness within Riku’s heart, but she had never sensed an additional _presence_ residing in the silver-haired boy. It was only ever an invisible darkness, pervading his bones, weighing him down... that she had initially offered to lock away within him. Forming chains around DiZ with an ease of familiarity she is only now coming to understand. 

That bond of darkness… was it—invading DiZ? Overcoming him? What hadn’t she seen?

Through Riku’s mind, she had thought she wouldn’t need anything more from each of those horrible incidents. There had been many times when Riku remained blindfolded through the whole thing, but often DiZ would rip the black strip of cloth off the boy’s face, and from Riku’s eyes, she could see what he had felt. 

She dives back in, and from DiZ’s eyes, she recovers what she missed. 

Experiencing the man’s feelings is revolting. She doesn’t want to see her friend, vulnerable and exposed underneath him. She doesn’t want to see the blood, shame, despair, emptiness on Riku’s face. But she clenches her fists and focuses her attention on that heaviness between them. When DiZ invades, violates, penetrates the boy, she realizes what he’s looking for and what he gets every time—Riku’s internal struggle to resist giving up completely to this trauma is reflected in the flicker of golden eyes, and the _squeezing_ feeling of chains constricting them both.

And every time DiZ sees Riku’s eyes flash, those chains get stronger, and his brutality is reinvigorated. 

There is no one else there aside from those two, but she doesn’t think it’s DiZ. Or… it’s not _all_ DiZ. Xehanort may not _be there,_ but his hold on them both feels stronger than most humans’ wills. _Is he controlling DiZ, or unlocking darkness within him…? Who… what is Xehanort?_

Suddenly, Naminé feels small, more helpless than she felt at Castle Oblivion. ( _I can’t destroy darkness, I can only destroy memories. This goes back too far. I can’t obliterate DiZ’s memories of his apprentice. I can’t do this. I can’t defeat him._ )

She forces herself to breathe and plucks out a few decisions from her racing thoughts like salmon from a waterfall. ( _Get the memories. You knew you couldn’t save Riku from this. Just take those memories from DiZ. You can’t erase the connection between DiZ and Xehanort, or between Xehanort and Riku. But it doesn’t have to be bridged between DiZ and Riku. Destroy the bridge. Get the memories. Don’t just make him forget—destroy them._ )

Anxiety floods her senses as she wanes out of his mind. DiZ’s presence downstairs is shifting. She couldn’t feel more uncertainty in this moment, but she tests the strength of the chains she made with each memory and the darkness wrapping between them and they hold. She knows that she can’t afford to make a mistake by leaving out something critical, and also that she can’t afford to spend any more _time_ ensuring she didn’t leave out something critical. 

She takes into her small hands the whole, year-long chain–starting with the moment the heaviness first connected the two as they stood together on a dark road, and ending at Riku’s capture of Roxas—bloody, riddled with screams and sobs, heavy from enough trauma to send anyone out of their mind permanently—

—and obliterates it.

She doesn’t waste even a second before calling a dark corridor and walking through, the stack of drawings disintegrating into ash at her feet.

—

It isn’t until Destiny Islands’ trio is reunited, she’s slowly nestling herself within Kairi’s heart, and she’s watching Sora sink to his knees in front of Riku with _that_ look of anguish, that Naminé feels like she might not be the only one left with memories of what happened to Riku.

—

**Author's Note:**

> so this is "what if Xehanort tried to make Riku succumb to the darkness in a different way?" plus "how has nobody explored the canon-abusive relationship between DiZ and Riku?" multiplied by "let's take this extremely out of hand" -- while still trying to make it fit with canon
> 
> there might be a second chapter, but like Naminé, I find it much easier to destroy things than to put them back together, so who knows...


End file.
